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Monday, December 16, 2013

Follow...Follow...Follow...BLOCK

I have had a rash of "people", usually business, who follow, then unfollow the follow me again. Often it's people I am already following. Occasionally it's people I have no intention of follow. I like getting notifications that I have a new follower on Pinterest, Twitter and so on. I dislike when it's used as an attention grabbing technique. After a fewtimes I end up blocking the offending account from following me at all.

I follow who I like and don't see it as a popularity contest. I don't unfollow people who don't follow me back. The point, as I see it, is to keep up with things and people that interest me. When looking online I saw that I may be in the minority opinion. Many posts were dedicated to finding out who didn't follow you back and how to unfollow them. Strikes me as a little childish.

Sometimes it's not a quid pro quo thing. For the people I already follow it seems to be attention seeking. "Look at me!!! I'm right here!!! You don't notice my posts enough, so I'm going to make sure you remember me!!!!!! You'll get an email reminding you that I exist!!" I followed them because I had an interest, but generally that interest isn't strong enough to keep me from blocking them. Even if I know them IRL.

This is on my mind today because there were 3 offenders, all on their 4th or 5th follows. Part of it is on me. My phone beeps when I get an email and I check it every time. I could say that it's because I conduct a lot of business via email, but really I've been spoiled by the era of smart phones.

So I get extra annoyed when I get the beep and it's just someone begging for attention. Or a daily reminder from a store I thought I wanted to shop at. Weekly or even bi-weekly reminders I don't mind, but daily?? That's a whole other rant though.

3 comments:

I'm probably one of those "offenders" on Pinterest. Did you know that your account comes up as new every time I log on to my pinterest, and asks me to follow again? For a while I hit follow every time. Then I stopped. So I'm not sure if I'm following you on Pinterest at this point or not. Oh well.